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Prisoners, Lovers & Spies by Kristie Macrakis

Oliver Moody

July 12 2014, 1:11am, The Times

There is something reassuring about secret writing. We tend to think of the history of technology as a progression from crude simplicity to artful complexity. Yet here, in 1915, is the man from MI6 masturbating into a flask to obtain his invisible ink. One officer in Copenhagen got slightly carried away. He “stocked it in a bottle”, papers in the Imperial War Museum record, “for his letters stank to high heaven and we had to tell him that a fresh operation was necessary for each letter.”

Here, too, is Thomas Robins, an honoured guest of HMP Wandsworth in 1935, straining his morning porridge through a rag to make an ink capable of eluding even the ultraviolet lamps of MI5. Touchingly, Robins presented his discovery to…